archaeology, illustration and comics

ICePé Cómic

“Nuestra Herencia Taina” – Comic produced by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena.

Thanks to Scott Fitzpatrick who forwarded on this educational archaeology comic from Puerto Rico. Published by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña firstin 2002 and reprinted in 2008, it predates the prehistory comics Scott and I were putting together out in the Caribbean by a good two or three years.

The comic follows the story of a group of children on a school trip to to a local museum, prehistoric site and working archaeological excavation. Back home, the friends step through their bedroom mirror and enter prehistory, where they visit a prehistoric Amerindian (Taino) village, meet children their own age and exchange gifts with the locals – including a small Puerto Rican flag. Back in their own time, they read a newspaper report that archaeologists have discovered an Amerindian burial holding a miniature Puerto Rican flag! Written by Antonio Aguado Charneco and drawn by Hector Virella, the comic is a production of Animacion Boricua Inc., a company which appears to produce – among other works – comics dealing with citizenship, voting, education, etc. and animated films.

The storyline and information content conform to a fairly standard type of educational archaeological comic. There is the presence of museums and excavations, real finds and real sites – even real archaeologists (the now-late Director of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Ricardo Alegría, gets a cameo on page two). Even the kids’ time-travelling jaunt and the extraño descubrimiento! conforms to tropes familiar to us from series like the Usborne Time Traveller, for example (or even the X-Files!). Other aspects of the comic’s structure seem familiar, including a rather straight-forward illustrated-lecture presentation of the archaeological information and a rather more exciting time-travel action sequence that follows. The comic certainly seems to feel like a familiar object from the moment you pick it up: the trio of kids and their dog on the cover, the story introduction by one of the characters, the school trip arriving at the museum on the opening page. I can’t put my finger on other examples, but it seems to me that this comic is mirrored in examples from museums and schools across the archaeological world.

If this ICePe comic is fairly representative of a particular kind of comic in archaeology, are we happy that they’re doing the job asked of them? There’s no doubt that this kind of light approach is engaging and entertaining – but is it really all that informative? It strikes me that out of a 13-page comic, only 2 1/2 pages really feature any archaeology. I can’t help feeling that one of the main reasons for using comics is to be able to fit more not less information into any set of visualisations. If I were an art editor I think I would expect comics such as these to contain more than 20% information.

This is something I’ve been thinking about in the context of the comics I’ve been doing on Anglesey. There, we’ve eschewed any suggestion of using “Billy the young archaeologist” or any kind of time-travel trope in favour of just jumping straight into the information – the same approach I took with the Caribbean comics (and, indeed, in my British Science Festivalcomic). In both instances I was unwilling to sacrifice space and narrative focus to a series of extraneous characters. What is the end result? Is a “narrator-less” archaeological comic more informative, more full of facts and figures? Or does a comic with a time-travelling juvenile Scooby-gang actually engender a completely different kind of engagement with its readers – a more useful kind of engagement, perhaps? (I mean no disrespect: I’m quite a fan of time-travelling juvenile Scooby-gangs) What comics creators in archaeology could really do with – myself included – is some good data on which approach works best in which particular situations. It might help the genre as a whole embrace tropes which are actually useful, and dispense with those which are actually proving to be counterproductive.

About Me

I've been an archaeologist and illustrator for over twenty years, working mostly on prehistoric sites in the UK, eastern Europe, Anatolia, the West Indies and the Pacific. I'm particularly interested in the role of narrative in archaeological visualisation. Over the past few years this has resulted in writing and illustrating comics for archaeological excavation projects, sites and museums, including CADW and the Museum of London.

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